Abstract
Past studies examining how people judge faces for trustworthiness and dominance have suggested that they use particular facial features (e.g. mouth features for trustworthiness, eyebrow and cheek features for dominance ratings) to complete the task. Here, we examine whether eye movements during the task reflect the importance of these features. We here compared eye movements for trustworthiness and dominance ratings of face images under three stimulus configurations: Small images (mimicking large viewing distances), large images (mimicking face to face viewing), and a moving window condition (removing extrafoveal information). Whereas first area fixated, dwell times, and number of fixations depended on the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision, and varied substantially across participants, no clear task differences were found. These results indicate that gaze patterns for face stimuli are highly individual, do not vary between trustworthiness and dominance ratings, but are influenced by the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision.
Highlights
When presented with a person’s face, people rapidly form first impressions (Ballew & Todorov, 2007; Bar, Neta & Linz, 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof, 2009; Willis & Todorov, 2006)
When computer-generated face stimuli are created based on these ratings, the generated faces suggest that smiles lead to trustworthy faces, whereas expressions of anger lead to untrustworthy faces
No interaction between image gender and task was found (v2(1) = 1.20, p = 0.27) and no main effect of image gender (v2(1) = 1.46, p = 0.23), but there was a main effect of task (higher trustworthiness than dominance ratings, v2(1) = 7.14, p = 0.0075)
Summary
When presented with a person’s face, people rapidly form first impressions (Ballew & Todorov, 2007; Bar, Neta & Linz, 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof, 2009; Willis & Todorov, 2006). While many different social judgments can be made about other people (e.g. competence, friendliness, approachability), research has suggested that these can be reduced to two main, largely independent dimensions: trustworthiness and dominance. Together, these dimensions explain around 80% of the variance in people’s ratings of another person’s face on various social dimensions (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008; Todorov et al, 2008). Dominance was signalled by strength and masculinity (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008)
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